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Morpheme-based literacy training programs are widely used in German primary schools. This study investigated whether (1) morphological training is effective early in development (Grade 2) and (2) literacy gains can be attributed to advanced morphological processing. Fifty-two German-speaking second-graders participated in an eight-week morpheme-based training program, while an age-matched control group (n = 41) attended regular language classes. All children completed spelling, reading and morphological awareness tasks and participated in a masked primed lexical decision experiment, once before training, and then again following training. We observed training effects for spelling and reading morphologically complex words, with bigger increases in the intervention than the control group. In addition, the masked priming results revealed that lexical decision times decreased more strongly in the intervention than the control group, but there was no clear training impact on the pattern of morphological priming. However, the performance on standardized reading tests and a morphological awareness task did not differ across participant groups. Thus, while written language processing improved, it is unclear whether these effects can be attributed to morphological processing or rather general gains in orthographic knowledge.

Distributing study opportunities over time typically improves the retention of verbal material compared to consecutive study trials, yet little is known about the influence of temporal spacing on orthographic form learning specifically. This experiment sought to obtain and compare estimates of the magnitude of the spacing effect on written word form learning across three different outcome measures, administered between participants. Skilled adult readers (N = 120) read aloud 16 sentences containing an embedded pseudoword a total of four times. Half of the items were temporally distributed (appearing once in each of four blocks), while half were massed (read on four consecutive trials within a block). After a short delay, learning was assessed using tests of recognition (orthographic choice) or recall (spelling to dictation or letter cue spelling). There was a significant effect of spacing across all outcome measures (all p < 0.001). When the magnitude of the spacing effect was compared across these three measures, letter cue spelling showed a significantly larger spacing effect than spelling to dictation (p = 0.039) while orthographic choice did not significantly differ from either (both p > 0.05). These findings indicate that temporal spacing influences the learning of orthographic form, regardless of the outcome measure used.

Purpose: Readers can draw on their knowledge of sound-to-letter mappings to form expectations about the spellings of known spoken words prior to seeing them in written sentences. The current study asked whether such orthographic expectancies are observed in the absence of contextual support at the point of reading. Method: Seventy-eight adults received oral vocabulary training on 16 novel words over two days, while another set of 16 items was untrained. Following training, participants saw both trained and untrained novel words in print for the first time within a lexical recognition task. Half of the items had spellings that were predictable from their pronunciations (e.g., "nesh"), while the remainder had spellings that were less predictable from their pronunciations (e.g., "koyb"). Results: Participants were able to recognize newly learned words, and lexical recognition latencies displayed clear evidence of orthographic expectancies, as evidenced by a larger effect of spelling predictability for orally trained than untrained items. Conclusion: These data are consistent with the emergence of orthographic expectancies even when written words are first encountered in isolation.

In this theoretical review, evidence for the link between spoken and written word knowledge is summarised, highlighting the specific hypotheses posed in this field and the extent to which they are informative regarding causation. A brief overview of major theories of orthographic learning draws attention to how each characterises the role of oral vocabulary within the learning process, and the timing of its influence. The theoretical foundations and evidence for two cognitive mechanisms that seek to explain the relationship between spoken and written word knowledge are outlined, drawing attention to a key difference between them: the proposed timing of the effect. "Set for variability" (or "mispronunciation correction") is thought to operate from the point of visual exposure, while "orthographic skeletons" are thought to exert an influence on written word learning that begins before exposure to written words. The review closes with a discussion of directions for future research.

Purpose: Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. Method: Eighty-five Kindergarten children were randomly assigned to either Look and Say (LSay), Look and Spell (LSpell), mispronunciation correction (MPC), or wait-list control conditions. Children were taught 12 irregular words over three sessions. Amount of instructional time and number of exposures to the written and spoken forms of the words was controlled across the three experimental conditions. After training, children were assessed on reading aloud and orthographic choice measures. Results: Children showed evidence of superior learning of trained words in the LSpell and MPC conditions, compared to LSay and control conditions. Differences between the LSpell and MPC conditions were not significant. There was no evidence of generalization to untrained items. Conclusions: Findings indicate that active processing of a word's orthography is crucial for learning irregular words. These results have implications for initial reading instruction. Further research is required to determine whether differences between LSpell and MPC conditions emerge after longer periods of training.

Two masked priming experiments investigated the impact of prime lexicality (word vs. nonword) and the pseudo-morphological structure of prime stimuli (pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) on embedded word priming effects. In the related prime conditions, target words were embedded at the beginning of prime stimuli and were followed either by a derivational suffix (e.g., "corner-corn; cornry-corn") or a nonsuffix but orthographically legal word ending (e.g., "dragon-drag; dragip-drag"). Lexical decisions to target words were facilitated by related pseudosuffixed primes compared with unrelated primes, and this occurred to the same extent for word primes ("corner-corn") and nonword primes ("cornry-corn"). On the other hand, target word recognition was inhibited by related nonsuffixed word primes ("dragon-drag"), and no priming was found with nonsuffixed nonword primes ("dragip-drag"). Conditional suffix probability--the probability that a string-initial embedded word will be followed by a derivational suffix in a lexicon of all uninflected morphologically simple and derived words - determined the size of priming effects obtained with nonsuffixed primes. Two main conclusions are drawn on the basis of these findings: (a) the presence of a pseudo-morphological structure in words such as "corner" limits the impact of lateral inhibitory influences on embedded word priming, and (b) in the absence of a pseudo-morphological structure, one possible factor determining embedded word priming is the likelihood that the embedded word will be followed by a derivational suffix.

Processing a word in a second language (L2) may be hindered or helped by the simultaneous activation of similar words present in L2 and in addition by similar words that occur in the first language (L1). Precise mechanisms for influencing variables within L2 and cross-language processing are still little understood. The current visual word recognition study explored orthographic neighborhood density (ND) effects in L2 English, replicating the effects for Dutch–English while expanding the exploration to a new language combination, Spanish–English. The within- and across-language effects were explored in a group of Dutch–English and Spanish–English bilinguals. English L2 targets were subdivided into four ND conditions: high L1 + high L2, high L1 + low L2, low L1 + high L2, and low L1 + low L2. For Experiment 1, an analysis of generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMMs) revealed that Dutch (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals showed a facilitatory main effect of English ND on reaction times and error rates. However, an inhibitory main effect of L1 Dutch ND on L2 visual word recognition was only observed for reaction times, not error rates. Overall, no interaction was detected between L1 and L2 NDs for reaction times or error rates. Additionally, a factorial permutation test confirmed the L2 facilitatory effect on both reaction times and error rates, while it supported an L1 inhibitory effect for error rates only. In Experiment 2, a GLMM analysis replicated the L2 facilitatory effect on reaction times in Spanish (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals but did not reveal an inhibitory main effect of L1 on L2 word recognition. Instead, we found a significant interaction between English (L2) and Spanish (L1) ND. Reaction time patterns were confirmed by the non-parametric analysis, although with only a marginally significant interaction. For error rates, no effect for ND was detected using GLMMs. However, the permutation test revealed significant L2 facilitatory and L1 inhibitory effects on L2 word recognition but no significant interaction. Our data confirm a robust L2 facilitatory main effect of ND on reaction times across experiments and analyses, while L1 inhibitory main and interaction effects were less robust across experiments and analyses. The latter may be dependent on language specificity and speaker characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that information from spoken language is integrated into reading processes, but the nature of these links and how they are acquired is less well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that predictions about the written form of newly learned spoken words are already generated prior to print exposure. We extend this work to morphologically complex words and ask whether the information that is available in spoken words goes beyond the mappings between phonology and orthography. Adults were taught the oral form of a set of novel morphologically complex words (e.g., "neshing", "neshed", "neshes"), with a 2nd set serving as untrained items. Following oral training, participants saw the printed form of the novel word stems for the first time (e.g., nesh), embedded in sentences, and their eye movements were monitored. Half of the stems were allocated a predictable and half an unpredictable spelling. Reading times were shorter for orally trained than untrained stems and for stems with predictable rather than unpredictable spellings. Crucially, there was an interaction between spelling predictability and training. This suggests that orthographic expectations of embedded stems are formed during spoken word learning. Reading aloud and spelling tests complemented the eye movement data, and findings are discussed in the context of theories of reading acquisition.

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in terms of both orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. English is the least consistent, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, as well as the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. Two opposing hypotheses were formulated. If orthographic consistency modulated the use of morphology in reading, readers of English should show more robust morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, because morphological units increase the reliability of spelling-to-sound mappings in the English language. In contrast, if the use of morphology in reading depended on the morphological complexity of a language, readers of French, German, and Italian should process morphological units in printed letter strings more efficiently than readers of English. Both developing and skilled readers of English showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages. These results support the idea that the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used during reading. We explain our findings within the remit of extant theories of reading acquisition and outline their theoretical and educational implications.

Masked priming studies have shown that readers decompose morphologically complex words ("read+er"). Interindividual differences have been suggested to affect this phenomenon. However, its development is poorly understood. We addressed this issue by taking a longitudinal approach that allows greater rigor in establishing the relationship between grade, reading skill, and morphological priming. A masked priming lexical decision task with suffixed words ("kleidchen-KLEID"), suffixed nonwords ("kleidtum-KLEID"), non-suffixed nonwords ("kleidekt-KLEID") and unrelated primes ("träumerei-KLEID") was administered to 98 children in grade 2, and again in grade 3 and 4 of elementary school. Reading skill was measured at each testing point. Grade and reading skill were associated with distinct patterns of priming: all priming effects increased with reading skill, whereas priming from non-suffixed nonwords decreased with grade. This suggests that the ability to identify stems can be associated with reading skills, while sensitivity to affixes is acquired over grades.

The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that made it possible to independently investigate the role of stems and suffixes in the visual and auditory domain. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating that morphology plays a more prominent role in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language.

This study used a novel word learning paradigm to investigate the role of morphology in the acquisition of complex words, when participants have no prior lexical knowledge of the embedded morphemic constituents. The influence of morphological family size on novel word learning was examined by comparing novel stems (torb) combined with large morphological families (e.g., torbnel, torbilm, torbla, torbiph) as opposed to small morphological families (e.g., torbilm, torbla). In two online experiments, participants learned complex novel words by associating words with pictures. Following training, participants performed a recognition and a spelling task where they were exposed to novel words that either did or did not contain a trained morpheme. As predicted, items consisting of a trained and an untrained constituent were harder to reject but easier to spell than those that did not contain any trained constituents. Moreover, novel words including trained constituents with large morphological families were harder to reject than those including constituents with small morphological families. The findings suggest that participants acquired novel morphemic constituents without prior knowledge of the constituents and point to the important facilitatory role of morphological family size in novel word learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study asked whether oral vocabulary training can facilitate reading in a second language (L2). Fifty L2 speakers of English received oral training over three days on complex novel words, with predictable and unpredictable spellings, composed of novel stems and existing suffixes (i.e., vishing , vishes , vished). After training, participants read the novel word stems for the first time (i.e., trained and untrained), embedded in sentences, and their eye movements were monitored. The eye-tracking data revealed shorter looking times for trained than untrained stems, and for stems with predictable than unpredictable spellings. In contrast to monolingual speakers of English, the interaction between training and spelling predictability was not significant, suggesting that L2 speakers did not generate orthographic skeletons that were robust enough to affect their eye-movement behaviour when seeing the trained novel words for the first time in print. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we examine the specific nature of such priming effects by testing whether they are modulated by morphological family size. We reasoned that if the effects are driven by pre-lexical orthographic processing then they should not be influenced by the family size of the embedded target word. On the contrary, we found that embedded words having several morphologically related family members (e.g., "serpentoche"--"SERPENT" [English: "snakerel"--"SNAKE"]--"serpents," "serpentin," "serpentine," "serpenter," "serpentant") generated greater priming than embedded words having only the plural form in the morphological family (e.g., "dauphingri"-"DAUPHIN" [English: "dolphinald"--"DOLPHIN"]). We therefore conclude that embedded stem priming is at least partly driven by processing at the level of lexical and morpho-semantic representations.

In this study, we examined the effect of previewing unfamiliar vocabulary on the real‐time reading behavior of first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers. University students with English as their L1 or L2 read passages with embedded pseudowords. In a within‐participant manipulation, definitions of the pseudowords were either previewed before reading or reviewed after reading. Previewing significantly affected reading behavior on early and late eye‐movement measures, and the patterns of change on the first three contextual encounters with the pseudowords differed for L1 and L2 readers. On the multiple‐choice cloze posttest, encountering novel words in reading followed by definitions resulted in somewhat more accurate responses for L1 but not L2 participants. The learning condition did not affect the results of the meaning recall posttest. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between vocabulary support approaches and the reading behavior of L1 and L2 readers when they encounter unfamiliar words in texts. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in non‐technical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explored the role of constituent frequency and distractor type in complex word learning. Skilled readers were trained to associate novel letter strings with one out of two pictures, with one picture serving as the target, and the other as a distractor. A facilitatory effect of first-constituent frequency was found only in trials where distractors promoted first-constituent learning, and a facilitatory effect of second-constituent frequency only in trials where distractors promoted second-constituent learning, but not vice versa. Learning occurred in the absence of any pre-existing knowledge about the constituent morphemes and any explicit reference to the constituents during learning. The results point to the important role of constituent frequency and distractor type in novel word learning and provide insights into the mechanisms involved in the implicit acquisition of morphological knowledge in adult learners, that we suspect to be a key aspect of language learning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has repeatedly revealed evidence for morpho-orthographic priming effects in suffixed words. However, evidence for the morphological chunking of prefixed words is sparse and ambiguous. The goal of the present study was to directly contrast the processing of prefixed and suffixed pseudowords within the same experiment. We carried out a masked primed lexical decision experiment, in which the same target ("AMOUR" [LOVE]) was preceded by a prefixed ("préamour" [prelove]), a nonprefixed ("brosamour" [broslove]), a suffixed ("amouresse" [lovedom]), and a nonsuffixed ("amourugne" [lovedel]) prime. The results revealed significant priming across all four conditions. Moreover, priming was modulated by individual differences in reading proficiency. High-proficiency readers showed evidence for embedded stem priming effects, independent of whether stems occurred in combination with a real affix or a nonaffix. This finding is of relevance to recent morphological processing theories, suggesting that embedded stems represent salient activation units during the reading of complex pseudowords.

German skilled readers have been found to engage in morphological and syllable-based processing in visual word recognition. However, the relative reliance on syllables and morphemes in reading multi-syllabic complex words is still unresolved. This study aimed to unveil which of these sublexical units are the preferred units of reading by employing eye-tracking technology. Participants silently read sentences while their eye-movements were recorded. Words were visually marked using colour alternation (Experiment 1) or hyphenation (Experiment 2)—at syllable boundary (e.g., Kir-schen), at morpheme boundary (e.g., Kirsch-en), or within the units themselves (e.g., Ki-rschen). A control condition without disruptions was used as a baseline (e.g., Kirschen). The results of Experiment 1 showed that eye-movements were not modulated by colour alternations. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that hyphens disrupting syllables had a larger inhibitory effect on reading times than hyphens disrupting morphemes, suggesting that eye-movements in German skilled readers are more influenced by syllabic than morphological structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., "R" in "propoint" or "filmure") or in a non-prefix beginning or non-suffix ending (e.g., "R" in "cropoint" or "filmire"). Prefixed and suffixed letter-strings comprised real stems and affixes but never formed a real word. Effects of letter cluster frequency were also investigated by manipulating the frequency of non-affix beginnings and endings. Letter search took longer in suffixes compared with non-suffix endings but not for prefixes compared with non-prefix beginnings. Moreover, performance was not affected by letter cluster frequency. We interpret our findings in the light of recent accounts of morpho-orthographic segmentation and the different function of prefixes and suffixes.

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., "teach") is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., "teacher"). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed that equal magnitudes of masked stem-target priming are obtained for both morphologically complex word primes (e.g., "doloroso-DOLOR" ["painful-PAIN"]) and morphologically complex nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the stem (e.g., "dlooroso-DOLOR"). Experiment 2 used morphologically complex nonword primes comprising lexically illegal combinations of stems and suffixes (e.g., "total + ito" ["a little total"]). Priming was obtained for morphologically related nonword primes (e.g., "totalito-TOTAL"), but not for nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the pseudostem (e.g., "ttoalito-TOTAL"). Our data suggest that morphoorthographic parsing mechanisms benefit from semantic constraints at early stages in the reading system, which we discuss in the context of current morphological processing accounts.